If you prefer to live the life even though it is below average, you are not following the recommendations of average utilitarianism
No indeed; you are favouring your own interests rather than producing the best possible world. As, in fact, we all do most of the time, whether or not we are average utilitarians.
If you are considering the welfare of some specific person who specifically matters to you (e.g., your own child, whether actual or hypothetical) then again you are probably not actually going to be aiming to maximize average utility, whether or not you are an average utilitarian.
If, considering people to whom you have no particular connection, your intuition is that it would always be a good thing to add to the world a life that (seen from the inside) is worth living—well, that means you aren’t an average utilitarian. That’s obviously OK; most people are not average utilitarians. But “entirelyuseless is not an average utilitarian” is a quite different claim from “average utilitarianism is absurd”.
A measure of goodness that automatically says that 50% of lives are bad lives, no matter how good they are, is not a good measure of goodness.
Again: average utilitarianism does not say that they are bad lives. It says that if you are choosing between a world with them and an otherwise identical world without them, you should choose the latter. That is not the same statement.
No indeed; you are favouring your own interests rather than producing the best possible world. As, in fact, we all do most of the time, whether or not we are average utilitarians.
If you are considering the welfare of some specific person who specifically matters to you (e.g., your own child, whether actual or hypothetical) then again you are probably not actually going to be aiming to maximize average utility, whether or not you are an average utilitarian.
If, considering people to whom you have no particular connection, your intuition is that it would always be a good thing to add to the world a life that (seen from the inside) is worth living—well, that means you aren’t an average utilitarian. That’s obviously OK; most people are not average utilitarians. But “entirelyuseless is not an average utilitarian” is a quite different claim from “average utilitarianism is absurd”.
Again: average utilitarianism does not say that they are bad lives. It says that if you are choosing between a world with them and an otherwise identical world without them, you should choose the latter. That is not the same statement.